Cooling devices for cooling heat generating bodies such as semiconductor elements have been known. By way of example, Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2005-57130 (Patent Document 1) describes a semiconductor cooling unit having a structure in which a semiconductor element is placed between a pair of flat electrode plates, and a coolant passage is formed in the electrode plate.
Further, Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2004-158489 (Patent Document 2) describes a pressure contact semiconductor device including a plurality of semiconductor element stacked bodies with a plurality of stacked semiconductor elements, and a plurality of rectifier element stacked bodies with a plurality of stacked rectifier elements, held with pressure in the stacking direction.
According to Patent Document 1, a plurality of coolant passages are allotted to one semiconductor element. Therefore, the structure for cooling semiconductor element comes to have a large size. This hinders reduction in size of the semiconductor module including the semiconductor element. The cooling passage according to Patent Document 2 is not formed in an external connection terminal and, therefore, cooling mechanism becomes large, hindering reduction in size of the semiconductor device.